Developing an Airfoil App for Fusion 360
Published
January 10, 2016I developed an open-source app to generate sketch profiles of NACA airfoils in Autodesk® Fusion 360™. This is available as code that can be used directly as a script in Fusion, or as a packaged add-in from the app store.
The way this came about is that I was working on a customer CFD application that required models consisting of various airfoils. It would have been tedious to build all these by hand, so I started looking for an automated solution. I discovered a python script to generate points along the profile of an airfoil from its NACA number, but nothing to create sketches or models within CAD.
Fusion 360 apps were relatively new, so I thought it would be a fun exercise to wrap dgorissen’s script in a Fusion app. I built a simple UI, drew up some graphics, and packaged an app for anyone to use!
This airfoil app has been a featured app and a most popular app in the Fusion app store with over 1100 downloads as of December 2016.
A 3D extrusion of the airfoil sketch gets us a wing:
